Items

• A day and a night at the baths
  This book describes Michael Rumaker’s (1932-2019) first visit to the baths at West 28th Street, Manhattan. Although not named, this was the location of the Everard Turkish and Russian baths, which opened in 1888 and became a meeting place for gay men. Tragedy hit the increasingly run-down building in 1977, when nine men died in a fire so devastating it made newspaper headlines. This book is dedicated to all those who were at the Everard Baths during the fire and particularly “to the spirit of the rainbow gay and lesbian phoenix, rising” from the ashes. The publisher is Donald Allen whose Grey Fox imprint published works by several Beat authors, including Allen Ginsberg, whose words of praise for this book are on the back cover. Earlier in his career, Rumaker was aligned with the Beat movement.
• The sunny side of Castro Street : a diary of sorts
  A detailed, first-person account of bars, cruising and bathhouses in 1970s San Francisco by Dan Vojir (1947-). It also includes an extended memoir of growing up gay in a second-generation Czech immigrant family in Berwyn, Illinois, before Vojir moved to San Francisco’s Castro neighbourhood in 1974. “It’s a charmer”, proclaimed one contemporary reviewer. Vojir was a writer for the ‘Castro Times’ newspaper and worked in publishing as well as hosting a radio talk show, ‘Strictly Books’. ‘The Sunny Side of Castro Street’ is illustrated by Ku Fu-Sheng in a distinctive style which combines pencil and pen-and-ink sketches with photographic collage.